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She stood, desolate in the middle of the living room, fighting back the need to weep. She nodded her head, and then recalled how he had pressed his face close to the two canvases when he had signed them for her. She clenched her hands into tiny fists and felt a rash of cold clammy sweat break out across her body.
“I understand,” she said.
“So you still want to sit for my painting?”
“Yes, of course.”
Blake was relieved. He bowed his head and for many moments just peered down at the rug-covered floor. When he looked up again, his face had changed, becoming somehow vulnerable and wounded. His eyes had the empty hollow cast of dark despair, as though he had stepped into a deep shadow.
“Sometimes,” he said softly, “I close my eyes and imagine what it will be like.” There was a whisper of anguish woven between his words. “I try to walk through the house with my eyes closed, groping for the walls, stumbling over pieces of furniture…” he shook his head suddenly overcome by his embarrassment, and turned blinking to stare out of the window.
Connie felt the yearning need to go to him, but she sensed that was not what he wanted. She stood very still and stared his broad back, watched the rise and fall of his shoulders as he took deep breaths.
“I don’t know what I’ll do about Ned,” Blake seemed to be speaking to the distant ocean. “I know it’s going to happen – I know I’m going to be blind one day – but I just can’t seem to come to terms with it, or prepare myself.”
“It might not happen for many years,” Connie offered in a consoling whisper.
Blake turned. “I wish you were right,” he said and fought to keep self-pity from his tone. “But it’s coming, Connie. I can sense it. One day in the near future, I’m going to find myself alone in a world of darkness that I can’t ever truly be prepared for.”
26.
Sunset came as a sudden surprise – they had talked through the afternoon, and it was only when Ned rose from his bed, stiff through his hind legs, that Blake seemed to recognize the painted riot of color that was spread across the setting sky. The big dog stood quietly waiting. Blake went through the kitchen and disappeared for a moment. When he returned he had a single red rose in his hand. He looked solemnly at Connie, torn for just an instant.
“We’re going down to the beach,” he said quietly. “We go there every day at this time. You’re welcome to come along if you like. It’s just a moment Ned and I share… but if you’re going to be staying here,” his voice trailed off to a toneless whisper, “you might as well know.”
She followed them down to the beach, watching man and dog walk slowly across the sand and down to the water’s edge, keeping her distance, leaving them to the intimate bond that seemed to drape around the two lonely figures like a cloak of grief.
It was cold. The breeze off the ocean was frigid, and the ocean without a blue sky above it had begun to turn slate grey as the waves rolled hissing and rumbling towards the beach. Connie wrapped her arms around herself and hugged her shoulders. The wind tugged at her hair and pulled errant tendrils from the bind of her ponytail.
She stood in silence and saw Blake lift his face to the tangerine clouds, stained by the bleeding color of the sun’s last light. Then he lowered his head to the rose, kissed the crimson petals, and waded into the surf until the white water was dashing against his knees. He threw the rose beyond the breaking line of the first wave and then came back to the sand and stood sadly beside the big dog until the tide drew the rose away, into the ocean’s icy embrace.
Blake stood stiffly, reached a hand down for the dog and patted the Great Dane’s head. Ned barked once, then fell silent. The sounds of the ocean seemed to rise and then softly sigh.
It was almost dark when at last they turned away from the sea and came slowly back up the beach. Connie noticed Blake’s eyes were red rimmed and swollen.
27.
“If there is a God, I believe he is a vengeful one,” Blake said slowly. He was seated at the small kitchen table, with Connie sitting quietly across from him. Between them were the remains of cold meat slices that had been eaten in strained gloomy silence.
Connie looked up into Blake’s face with an expression of surprise.
“What do you mean?”
Blake rose slowly from his chair, took the plates to the sink, then began pacing. He was frowning. Connie watched him as he took carefully measured steps like his feet were moving to the beat of some thumping sound echoing in his mind. The night suddenly became still, as if infused with an eerie heaviness, so that the only sound seemed to be the dull press of Blake’s shoes on the old timber floorboards.
Connie followed him with her eyes, twisting in her chair as he prowled the living room floor. He reached out absently and ran his fingers across the spines of the paperback novels on a bookshelf and then stopped at last, somehow dark despite being lit by all the blazing lights throughout the house. He sighed, and Connie sensed that at last he was ready to talk. She leaned forward attentively with her elbows propped on her knees and her chin cupped between her hands. She sensed the need to stay silent – to listen without interruption lest he lapse into silence, and yet, despite herself, she wanted to spare him the pain of explanation.
“Blake,” she said in a whisper, “It’s okay. You don’t have to tell me anything if you don’t want to… if fact I think I already know what you have been trying to say.”
Connie had always had an inkling of the dark tragedy that had changed his life, she realized – some preternatural sense, drawn from the paintings she had seen with the beautiful young woman, and his sudden decision to stop painting, to disappear from the world. She rose slowly, but kept her distance, not wanting to intrude, but needing to reach out to him with her understanding.
“Somewhere in your past, you lost the young woman you loved, and she was your muse. It’s the reason you gave up painting, and it’s the reason you go down to the beach each night,” Connie’s eyes became solemn and sad for him. Her face was very pale, her lips trembling. “She’s the woman in the paintings I saw.”
Blake looked haunted – a ghostly apparition that stood unmoving, with his features somehow blasted and eroded by the sudden heart wrenching pain that welled in his eyes. He stared at Connie, his gaze seeming to pass right through her, as though he was peering emptily at another time, another place.
“I have been given two gifts in my life,” his voice was raw and rusty, somehow detached from the man himself. “Two great loves. The first was painting. The second was my daughter, Chloe, who died when she was just six years old.”
Connie froze. An icy pall draped itself over her so that she could not breath, could only stare in horror.
“She drowned on that beach,” Blake said, his voice beginning to break into soft chokes as he fought back the sting of burning tears. “She drowned five years ago.” He moved away as though seeking darkness, his eyes suddenly haunted by the nightmares of his past. The timbre went from his voice until each word was flat and listless, devoid of color or emotion.
“When I was making my way through the art world – before I broke into the major galleries – I met a girl and we moved in together. We weren’t in love, we were just comfortable with each other’s company. Then, by happy accident, my daughter Chloe was born and my career began to take off. She was about to start school when I held my last exhibition in New York. We decided to move here. I wanted to be by the sea, I wanted to draw daily on the inspiration of the ocean for my next collection of paintings, so we came here to Maine, bought a dog, and I began painting for a show that would never happen…”
Blake moved like a shadowy specter, the light in the living room now directly over his head so that the strong broad of his brow turned his eyes into dark hollow sockets.
“One day I was working in the studio. Ned was still a pup, and he was curled up in a corner. The woman,” he could not bring himself to mention her name, “was on the beach with Chloe, playing in the surf line. It was sunset…”
r /> He couldn’t go on. He just fell silent for long moments, the tragedy of that moment playing over and over in his mind like an unimaginable nightmare. He heard the screams, the cries of panic and horror and then saw himself again running blindly through the house, his face white with shock, stumbling down onto the darkening beach with Ned at his heels. He saw the woman, her head buried in her hands and then realized…
Blake had blundered into the surf, screaming for Chloe, thrashing amongst the waves sobbing with fear, crying out until his throat was hoarse, until his legs could hold him no more.
“It’s why Ned and I go down to the beach at sunset and send a rose out into the sea,” he said at last. “And it’s why Ned goes every night to sit and wait on the empty beach until the sun comes up. He’s waiting for Chloe.”
Connie was crying, her face slick with heartbroken tears that fell like rain from her cheeks. She felt a choke of emotion in her throat so that every breath was a sobbing gasp. “The light house…” she said softly in understanding.
Blake nodded. “I leave the lights on, because I want Chloe to be able to find her way home, to find her way back to me,” he said helplessly.
“But the woman in the paintings?”
“Chloe,” Blake admitted. “I took five paintings and I added a beautiful raven-haired young woman to them. It was how I imagined her – how I pictured she might look if she had ever grown up. I sent the paintings out into the world in the hope that one day she might see them, see herself in one of my paintings and know that she was remembered… and loved…”
Connie felt broken – utterly destroyed. She could not stop the tears that burned in her eyes. Never had she imagined this man had held so much sadness within him, coveting it and holding it so close to him that like a destructive fire, it had burned away his heart and soul. She took a tentative step towards him, but Blake seemed to flinch from her. She stopped, went quiet again, sniffing back more tears and aching just to take him in her arms so that he could weep without shame, without reserve. Her lips were apart, quivering with grief.
“I thought God was vengeful,” Blake said. His shoulders were slumped now, his shape made gaunt and shrunken. He cuffed brusquely at tears that shone on his cheeks. “I thought I was being punished for not appreciating Chloe enough, not loving her enough, not being a good father. He took her from me because I was immersed in my art.”
